Faculty

Profile

Laura Maria Censabella is currently part-time Assistant Professor in Playwriting at CoPA, School of Drama where she won the Distinguished University-Wide Teaching Award. Her Ensemble Studio Theatre/Alfred P. Sloan commissioned play Paradise premiered at Underground Railway/Central Square Theater in Cambridge where it won an IRNE Award for Best New Play and was nominated for an Elliot Norton Outstanding New Script Award. In 2019 Paradise had a sold-out run at the Odyssey Theatre in Los Angeles—produced by Viola Davis and Julius Tennon—which then moved to The Matrix Theatre. She recently wrote the screenplay for Vicangelo Films and JuVee Productions, and the L.A. Theatre Works/Audible podcast version of the play will be released in November 2021. Laura is the recipient of the $10,000 ADAA Saroyan/Paul Human Rights Playwriting Award for Carla Cooks The War and her new play Beyond Words is an EST/Sloan science grant commissioned play on the extraordinary life and work of scientist Dr. Irene Pepperberg of Alex & Me fame. Her other plays and musicals have been developed or produced at the O’Neill Playwrights Conference, Gulfshore Playhouse, Philadelphia Festival Theatre for New Plays, the Women’s Project and Productions, Ensemble Studio Theatre, Portland Stage, the New Harmony Project, The Working Theatre, Interact Theatre (LA) and Urban Stages, among others. She has won three grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts: two in Playwriting, and the Geri Ashur Award in Screenwriting for her screenplay Truly Mary. She has also won two daytime television Emmy Awards. Her award-winning short film Last Call is available on Netflix and her plays have been published in the Best Short Plays of 2012-2013 (Applause Books), ConnotationPress.com, IndependentPlaywrights.com, Poems and Plays, and the St. Petersburg Review. She is a member of the Dramatists Guild, the Writers Guild of America East, and Honor Roll! (an action and advocacy group of women+ playwrights over 40), and she directs the Ensemble Studio Theatre Playwrights Unit. Selected past teaching includes Columbia University, City University, Sarah Lawrence College, the Sewanee Writers Conference, Summer Literary Seminars (St. Petersburg, Russia), the O’Neill Theater Institute, the 52nd Street Project, BACA, The Lincoln Center Institute, and Poets in Public Service. She graduated from Yale University. https://newplayexchange.org/users/8866/laura-maria-censabella